ON A WINDY March afternoon in 2017, protesters circled the steps of the Vermont state capitol. Rain streaked its golden dome as demonstrators sang civil rights songs. It was a classic Vermont rally. There were white-haired activists; Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, and Muslim clergy; young adults in beards and dreads; children carrying signs that said “We All Belong Here. We Will Defend Each Other.” At the center of the circle were a small group of dairy workers from remote mountain villages in southern Mexico.
The protesters sang in Spanish and English: “Como un árbol firme junto al río, No Nos Moverán. Just like a tree that’s standing by the water, We Shall Not Be Moved.” The song rose and fell, followed by a chant: “¡Ni una más! Not one more deportation!”
This was the third demonstration in four days to protest the arrest of three Vermont farmworker-activists—Enrique “Kike” Balcazar, Victoria “Zully” Palacios, and Alex Carrillo-Sanchez. Detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), they faced deportation. The three were swept up in a nationwide crackdown ordered by President Donald Trump. During the 2016 campaign, Trump had promised to rid the country of, in his words, “dangerous criminals” and “bad hombres.” But farmworker organizers had been targeted and deported for years before Trump’s election. “We are Mexicans and immigration is always chasing us,” said Vermont dairy activist Maribel Lopes. She was arrested by ICE when she left her workplace to buy diapers for a new baby.1
Alex Carrillo-Sanchez’s father-in-law, Lyle Deida, addressed the rally. “If it weren’t for migrant workers, our dairy products and everything else would go up higher to the point where we couldn’t afford it. So I say, let them do what they came here to do, which is to support their families,” he said, his voice hoarse and distressed.
Carrillo-Sanchez, Balcazar, and Palacios are all activists in Migrant Justice, an organization that promotes “worker-led social responsibility” on Vermont dairy farms. The National Education Association, the country’s largest union, awarded them the Cesar Chavez Civil and Human Rights Award. They also won the John Brown Freedom Award. Senator Bernie Sanders hailed them as “human rights defenders.” Twenty-four-year-old Balcazar has been described as “the face of undocumented labor in Vermont.” And that’s the problem. Migrant Justice activists are intentionally visible.
Balcazar moved to Vermont at sixteen to find work. He considers it home. Asked by local news media if he feared deportation, he replied: “I’m not scared at all. We’ve been here as a community fighting for our rights to live free and dignified lives and we aren’t going back in the shadows.” When Vermont ICE let it be known that they planned to arrest and deport Balcazar, allies offered him sanctuary in their homes. He graciously refused.2
Balcazar was tired of hiding. Just nineteen when he became active in Migrant Justice, he felt trapped on the farm where he worked seventy-to-eighty-hour weeks. The brutal schedule exhausted him. So did the stress of dodging immigration police.
Until 2013, undocumented Vermonters could not get driver’s licenses. Farmers would drive their workers to shop. In rural Vermont, one of the country’s whitest regions, vans of Mexicans were easy pickings for ICE. Migrant Justice led successful campaigns to ban racial profiling by state police and to enable undocumented Vermonters to get driver’s licenses. That victory came back to bite them.
A few Department of Motor Vehicles employees decided to send ICE copies of license applications “with south-of-the-border names.” Though against state law, the practice continued unrestrained. “We’re going to have to make you an honorary ICE officer,” an immigration agent wrote to a particularly cooperative DMV employee. The ACLU won a $40,000 settlement and DMV employees were warned by the state to stop the practice. But the case highlighted the impossible situation so many farmworkers find themselves in. ICE has continued targeting Migrant Justice activists. In the summer of 2017, two were arrested after a thirteen-mile march from the Vermont State House to Ben & Jerry’s headquarters.3
The protest was part of Migrant Justice’s most ambitious campaign, Milk with Dignity, through which they have tried to bring to Vermont’s dairy farms a system of worker-run labor inspections pioneered in 2011 by Florida tomato pickers. The approach has been incredibly effective. In three years, worker-run inspections dramatically improved conditions on Florida tomato farms that had been described by one federal judge as “ground zero for modern slavery.” Balcazar says: “I heard about the campaign and I was anxious to bring it here.”
Florida’s tomato and cane fields, featured in a 1960 documentary called Harvest of Shame, had long been infamous for inhumane labor practices. Conditions were little better in 2011. That’s when a group of indigenous workers from Mexico and Central America, members of an alternative labor union called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), developed a new strategy. They knew that farmers’ profit margins were thin in an era of falling food prices. So CIW decided to apply pressure at the top of the supply chain, on the fast-food and retail grocery chains who bought tomatoes in bulk.
To do that, they had to win the support of consumers. The key was making the invisible visible. CIW believed that was best accomplished when workers told their own stories. For fifteen years, from 2002 to 2017, tomato pickers have been doing that on cross-country “Truth Tours.” Field-workers have called on consumers, students, and clergy nationwide to pressure big tomato buyers to sign onto a Fair Food agreement. The strategy worked, and fast.
In three years, fourteen major companies—including McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Burger King, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, and Walmart—agreed to pay tomato growers a penny more per pound to increase worker salaries and fund inspections by an independent Fair Food Standards Council. When Walmart agreed in 2014, it was a milestone for international labor. Alexandra Guáqueta, chair of the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights, attended the contract signing.
CIW’s Fair Food Program turned the Florida tomato fields from the most hellish of American agricultural workplaces to among the best. Activists ran peer education programs for twenty thousand tomato workers. They resolved hundreds of wage theft, sexual harassment, and verbal-abuse cases. And by 2015, they had collected $14 million in “Fair Food premiums” from buyers that brought thousands of field-workers above the poverty line.
Fair Food also pioneered effective resistance to slave labor. Inspectors trained workers to identify and report slave labor situations. CIW was credited with helping to free twelve hundred workers being held unwillingly on Florida farms. Unscrupulous labor contractors and farmers were indicted. The UN Commission on Labor and Human Trafficking called CIW’s program a model that could raise labor standards on farms worldwide.4
The strategy spread through the low-wage workers’ movement. Fast-food workers and garment workers also began applying pressure at the top of the supply chain. CIW consulted in framing the Bangladesh Fire and Building Safety Accord and worked with Moroccan migrant tomato and berry pickers. Oxfam pressured UK supermarkets to demand decent conditions in their produce supply chains. And Oxfam US appealed to consumers to improve conditions in chicken processing. (In April 2017, that campaign won major concessions from Tyson, Perdue, and other large chicken processors.)5
Enrique Balcazar thought the idea was perfect for Vermont dairy farms. He knew that workers could not squeeze much out of hard-pressed dairy farmers struggling to survive in a time of corporate farming and falling milk prices. Still, migrant workers had leverage because dairy farming is a cold and dirty job that even unemployed Americans are loath to do. Vermont’s cows must be milked every twelve hours, 365 days a year, or they will die. And unlike other kinds of farms, dairy farmers are prohibited from using legal guest workers. So undocumented dairy workers and the Vermont dairy industry are inextricably bound together.
In 2014, Balcazar began pressing Vermont’s largest dairy buyers to demand improved labor conditions in their supply chains. “Ben & Jerry’s is one of the biggest purchasers of milk in Vermont,” Balcazar announced. “They’ve made a powerful brand by advertising that their products are fair trade. Milk with Dignity will make sure that this trade is truly fair.” Despite its hippie origins, the famous ice cream company had been sold in 2000 to multinational food conglomerate Unilever. Executives insisted that the company’s corporate responsibility code protected workers well enough. Balcazar disagreed.6
So Migrant Justice activists protested outside Ben & Jerry’s stores in sixteen cities. On International Workers’ Day 2015, speakers at a rally outside Ben & Jerry’s Vermont headquarters described working conditions in the company’s supply chain. Victor Diaz told of injuries he’d received when glass milk bottles exploded and chlorine (used to disinfect milking rooms) sprayed his eyes. Others spoke of sleep deprivation, because Vermont dairy workers do midnight milking. Twelve-to-fourteen-hour shifts, without a day off, are common. And workers have been housed in barns and unheated trailers through long, frigid Vermont winters.7
The Vermont dairy workers’ movement was born of tragedy: the 2009 death of a twenty-year-old Mayan dairy worker. José Obeth Santiz-Cruz was strangled when his clothing caught in an unsafe farm machine. This kind of injury was not unusual.
Dairy work is dangerous. In New York State alone, sixty-one dairy workers died in workplace accidents between 2006 and 2014. Vermont dairy workers were not strangers to protest and they were angry at having to risk life and limb. Many come from small towns in Chiapas, the southern Mexico region that gave birth to, and has long sustained, the Zapatista rebellion. By 2014, they were ready to rise.
Milk with Dignity was Vermont dairy workers’ bid for a brighter future, and Balcazar thought that Ben & Jerry’s should be more than willing to give it to them. “Ben & Jerry’s has stood up for cows (no RGBH), for chickens (cage-free agreement with Humane Society), and for international farmers (fair trade),” Balcazar argued. “They’ve pledged support for climate justice, for Occupy Wall Street. . . . So, after four years of us educating them about farmworker human rights abuses in its supply chain, it’s time Ben & Jerry’s stands up for the rights of the same farmworkers who put the cream in ice cream.” In July 2015, Ben & Jerry’s agreed.8
Then the foot-dragging began. CIW workers came to Vermont to strategize. Migrant Justice activists went on tour again, partnering with student groups to protest at ice cream shops and college campuses. When CEO Jostein Solheim spoke at Stanford, students chanted: “Hey, Ben & Jerry’s, can I get some Milk with Dignity in my Cherry Garcia?” Solheim was conciliatory. He agreed that worker-led safety codes were the best way to improve labor conditions. He patted his pocket and swore that he had a Milk with Dignity contract that “I hope I’m going to sign next week.” More than two years later, he had not signed.9
Thelma Gomez explained why dairy workers were protesting: “In Mexico, where I come from, we don’t have an economy where we can make a living, where we can live good lives. So we come here. And yet, when we come here we find ourselves alone, far away from our culture, from our land, from our communities, isolated and living as prisoners on our farms. Especially now, with the president we have, we feel trapped, without the freedom to leave our workplaces, to play with our kids in a park, to spend time with our families.”
On June 17, 2017, activists marched thirteen miles from the Vermont State House to Ben & Jerry’s headquarters, where Solheim announced that he was “ready to go.” Ten days later, Presbyterian congregations across the US sent a joint letter urging him to “not delay any longer . . . and sign in fact what you have already agreed to in principle.” Methodists sent one too, urged him to “continue Ben & Jerry’s legacy of justice-seeking . . . and fulfill your promise to workers, farmers, and consumers.” And Will Allen, Vermont organic pioneer, led organic farmers in challenging Ben & Jerry’s, along with Cabot Creamery, owned by Agri-Mark, to stop running “sweatshop dairies” that abuse farmworkers, exhaust cows, and bankrupt small farmers.10
Because dairy farms are excluded from the H-2A guest worker visa program, there is bipartisan opposition to deportations in dairy country. A bill forbidding state police from helping ICE easily passed the Vermont legislature and was signed into law by a Republican governor. Meanwhile, nervous dairy farmers organized emergency milking brigades to care for cows who would die if suddenly Vermont’s dairy workers were to disappear.
Peruvian immigrant Zully Palacios, who organizes discussion groups to break the isolation of migrant women and their kids, insists: “To fight for our rights is nothing bad. It’s a right we all have.” From ICE detention, she wrote: “I am sending my energy to you to win our rights and keep on fighting. Together we are more.” But days after her release, when she appeared on the news show Democracy Now!, she described how scared she was, locked in a tiny, dark cell, allowed no human contact for days.
On March 27, 2017, hundreds circled in a chill rain near the JFK Federal Building in Boston where deportation hearings were under way for Balcazar, Palacios, and Carrillo-Sanchez. The crowd included activists from Cosecha (Harvest)—a nationwide movement led by and for undocumented workers. Migrant Justice came with signs, a marching band, and ten thousand signatures calling on the judge to free “the Vermont Three.” Fifty activists went into the courtroom to let the detainees know that “they are not alone. Estamos en la lucha. We are fighting.”
Outside, protesters sang a 1930s union song, revived in the 1990s by activists seeking to build an international economic human rights movement. In the twenty-first century it has become an anthem of undocumented workers. “I went down to the courthouse and I took back what they stole from me. I took back my humanity. I took back my dignity. Now it’s under my feet. Ain’t gonna let nobody walk all over me.”
That evening, citing letters from Vermont’s senators, an immigration judge freed Balcazar and Palacios on bail, though the threat of deportation still loomed. But “the judge looked straight at my daughter and me and denied bail,” said Alex Carrillo-Sanchez’s wife, Lymarie Deida. “It’s OK. We are going to keep fighting.” Carrillo-Sanchez was deported on May 7, 2017, leaving behind a wife and daughter who are US citizens. “I’m angry,” he said. “But there’s no other way.” He applied for a marriage visa and began an indefinite wait.
More than five million US children live with undocumented parents, who work and pay taxes. ICE deported five hundred thousand parents of US citizen minors between 2009 and 2015. (That was before Trump took office.) Lymarie Deida wants voters to understand how scared these children are when parents are deported.
On June 30, 2017, Migrant Justice won release of activists arrested at the Ben & Jerry’s protest. “You Can’t Jail Hope!” they exulted. That was the title of a video they made during an earlier campaign to free detained leaders. In the Trump era, they struggle to hold on to that optimism. Meanwhile, in San Isidro, a town in Chiapas, a new crop of high school graduates with no way to support themselves, began preparing to head north to Vermont.
Then, on October 3, 2017, came a sweet, hard-won victory. Ben & Jerry’s finally signed the Milk with Dignity Agreement, giving dairy workers in their supply chain a full day off each week, Vermont minimum wage ($10 per hour), at least eight hours between shifts, and a guarantee that housing will include a real bed (not straw piles), electricity, and clean running water. These amenities for workers hardly seem revolutionary in the twenty-first century, and yet they are. Jostein Solheim, Ben & Jerry’s CEO, lauded the company’s leadership. “We love to be part of innovation. We believe in worker-led movements.” “Kike” Balcazar told a jubilant crowd in Burlington: “This is a historic moment for dairy workers. We have worked tirelessly to get here and now we move forward towards a new day in the industry.”11